Friday, August 29, 2014

I read the thumbsucker pieces about the Socialist Party in
Le Monde’s Ideas section yesterday, including the manifesto by the 200 Hollande
loyalists from the National Assembly. What did I get for my labors? It was like
plowing through a swamp of earwax – it was like being gnawed by weasals while
trying to escape from melting tundra. It was in other words a completely
unenlightening and vaguely disgusting experience, with an avoidance of the
issue at hand that would be frightening if it weren’t so yawn-worthily
predictable.

Here’s the issue at hand. The PS is at a record level of
unpopularity. Thus, the question at hand is what strategic sense it makes to be
unpopular and at the same time utterly shed one’s principles, embracing their
contradiction – neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, austerian economics and a
very public palling around with the malefactors of great wealth. It is one
thing to be unpopular because of one’s principles, and quite another to be
unpopular and adopt the opposition’s principles. It is, in short, a cretinous
strategy.

But it hasn’t been done by the PS alone. Time after time
over the past seven years, since the depression began, leftist parties in
Europe have abandoned everything they stood for and adopted austerianism. The
results of this move are in. The results are: the leftist party is rolled at
the general election by the standardbearer for the right, and are even rolled
by the populist anti-immigrant anti-European parties, which, while strictly
right on race and social matters, adopt a leftist economic stance.

If this were a simple footrace, what the PS is telling its
militants is that it is better to run it with a fifty kilo weight tied around
your neck.

These observations, which are extremely banal but at least
relevant to the issue of the party, are never even touched on by the
neo-liberal former Mitterand minister (and former payer of a half million
dollar fine in the US for shady business practices), the haughty poli sci prof,
and the 200. Instead, they serve up great gobs of rhetoric and re-heated third
way malarky, signifying absolutely nothing.

Why would an elite become so braindead that it can’t even
gain clarity about its own interests? This is a historical situation that pops
up often: think of the 1940 French military strategy, or the 2003 American Iraq
occupation strategy. Think of the crash of 2008. On this scale, the demise of the PS is a
minor matter, but it is still gruesomely interesting to watch.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The debacle of the French socialist party – which seems well
on its way to achieving a place in the museum of extinct parties, next to the
Frei Democratische party in Germany – can be explained, in large part, as a
phenomenon of the class struggle.

Class struggle! Haven’t we all gone beyond that since Reagan
and Thatcher freed the free world?

Well, one would think so as class becomes the absent
category in sociology and theory. But its sinking into the collective
unconscious doesn’t make it any less so.

The postwar years, from the late forties to the early
eighties, saw an almost Hegelian progression: the wage class and its unions
triumphed in the construction of the welfare state all over the developed
world. That very triumph, however, produced the children who buried the wage
class – the technocrats and meritocrats whose natural sympathies were for
Capital, not Labor. They looked like business execs and they thought like
business execs, and if they climbed through the channels of the Socialist Part (or
the SPD or the Labour party), they had no sympathy or understanding for the
culture and existences of the wage class. However, in the class system, certain
kinds are spinkled at random in the top and the bottom: especially women and
gays. In that respect, these technocrats did liquidate that old lefty
puritanism and patriarchal attitudes. What was never sprinkled at random in the
top was, of course, Africans or arabs, and one notices that they are still not
sprinkled in any ratio to their population through the top no matter what
flavor the government is.

The
triumph of the technocrat type meant, long ago, that the Socialist party,
founded as the party of the workers, was progressively hollowing out. The
parody of a socialist party that now rules France, with a neo-conservative
foreign policy, a neo-liberal economic policy, and a dog-whistle social policy
(see the Nouvelle Obs for the story of how the PS muckety mucks are usingNajat Vallaud-Belkacem http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20140827.OBS7342/quand-hollande-fait-croasser-la-droite-boutin.html
as a dogwhistle to the left, the way George Bush used to appoint evangelicals
as a sucker call to the right) will, I assume, come in behind the FN and the
UMP in 2017, when, if Hollande’s austerity policies are put in place,
unemployment should be reaching around 15 percent – it worked so well for
Spain, why not try it for France! The meritocrats who read their Mankiew, their
Chicago school economists, and have long ago replaced Marx with Hayek, will not
be touched by the unemployment – there is always more room in investment
banking for the meritocratic-lings, their darling daughters and sons. Magic
Fabius money for everyone! Interestingly, it will be the FN that will surely present
a more leftist economic platform, or at least a dirigiste one, and I expect
even the UPM will show some concern for the unemployed, rather than basking in
the glow of MEDEF.

It is hard to imagine
France without a left, but apparently this is what is happening. We have to
call the European project a complete success in that regard – reinstating the
gold standard in the form of the Euro, it was the product and generator of the
unbounded rule of speculative capital. You can try to vote against that rule:
you will fail.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

I was licked into shape by the Cold War. It was my mother
and my father, and I am still a piece of it as I advance towards my death in a
world that is no longer moored to it. Vast upheavels have the effecct of making
their survivors posthumous people, carrying about obsolete maps and concerned
with dead issues – themselves a sort of dead issue. For this reason I follow
lines of thought or seize on details that that seem pointless or defunct to
those who are under a certain age, and have grown up with a certain set of post
Berlin Wall references, and who have never dreamed, as children, of atom bombs
dropping from the sky. Similarly, I find it difficult to understand the events
and idees recues of the present, I have difficulty being “contemporary” – I
have to translate them, clumsily, into their historic “place”, dissolving them
so utterly into their causes that I entirely lose their effects – I understand
them to death, and don’t understand them at all.

I think of Nabokov as
a supremely cold war writer, or rather, as a writer whose reputation is
inseperable from the cold war, just as Orwell’s was. When Bend Sinister was
published by Time Life in 1964, with a special forward by Nabokov, the
connection was made explicit – here was a more another allegorical attack on
totalitarianism, ie the Soviet Union – although, as the “editors of Time Life”
note in the preface, there is a lot of word play in the book that even they
hadn’t noticed at first.

The cold war atmosphere comes comes across particularly when
you read the non-fiction – which is studded with opinions delivered in Nabokov’s
best Des Esseintes style, something that at first seems striking – like someone
insisting that artificial flowers are better than real ones – and that
eventually become an instance of how the manic pursuit of good taste eventually
destroys the very foundation of taste, substituting a game of more
sophisticated than thou – a game for feebs. This aestheticism was something
that seemed very familiar in the fifties, when Nabokov first started becoming
known in America. Michael Wood once wrote of how, in Speak Memory, Nabokov’s
elegy to “Sirin” – a Russian émigré writer who happened to be Nabokov’s
pseudonym – has a certain beauty in its place: “Remember
that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left
Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was
once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish
"as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When
Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his
way in American letters.“

Nabokov,
in 1950, was actually a rather coddled émigré, teaching at Harvard and friends
with the American mandarin of mandarins, Edmund Wilson. His opinions were
reliably anti-communist, a stance that he wrapped up in aesthetics – he basically
considered anything to the left of his father’s classical liberalism to be posh’lust,
which he expressed in a Paris Review interview by saying that mentioning
Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam in the same breath is “seditious posh’lust” – thus
perhaps reinflating the czarist notion of sedition for the last time. In the introduction
to the lectures on Russian writers, he claims that no writers of any note
flourished under the Soviets, and quotes Gladkov as a typical Soviet writer –
thus throwing Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha, among others, under the truck.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

“But these evils are
notorious and confessed; even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire,
besides their splendour and the sharpness of their light, will, with their
appendant sorrows, wring a tear from the most resolved eye; for not only the winter
is full of storms and cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts
and sharp frosts; the fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat, and burnt
with the kisses of the sun, her friend, and choked with dust; and the rich
autumn is full of sickness; and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because
sorrow is its biggest portion; and when we remember, that upon the fairest face
is placed one of the worst sinks of the body, the nose, we may use it not only
as a mortification to the pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest
outside of condition which any of the sons and daughters of Adam do posses.”

Jeremy Taylor’s Rules
and Exercizes of Holy Dying was one of the 17th century’s
bestsellers; through the nineteenth century, it was a prime example of raree,
cadenced prose that crawled into the sentences of Johnson, Coleridge, Emerson
and many others. Oh that seventeenth century rag, faint bits of which we still
dance to today.

Taylor’s notion of the
nose as a sink of the body and a monument to our mortification is the place
where I start with noses, a subject that has been forced upon me over the last
two weeks, as I’ve been dripping from it, or suffering from its drying up, or
in general living a little too familiarly with, like a prisoner trapped within my
sinuses and unable to think of anything else. e.

Of course, poor Jeremy
Taylor must have witnessed a good many colds in Golden Grove, the house in
South Wales where he wrote the Holy Dying. The book is inspired by the death of
his wife, Phoebe, in 1651. Who knows, perhaps she died of a disease that had
recently started entering the vocabulary of the English: influenza, named for
the influence of the stars that was thought to incubate the disease. In his
death sermon on his patroness, Lady Carbery, who died at around the same time,
Taylor mentions that many new diseases had appeared lately, and many old ones
had changed in circumstances and symptoms, which showed some awareness of the
disease landscape around him. So who knows how prominently noses figured in
Taylor’s life in 1651, when he wrote his greatest work, or how irritated he was
at their running.

On the other side of the
channel, we have another religious man, an infinitely greater thinker, Blaise
Pascal, who also left a famous remark about noses: Pensee no 29 - “Le nez
deCléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait
changé * Pascal wrote down three versions of this
thought, but all of them agree that it was the size of Cleopatra’s schnozzle, and not its cuteness,
its diminuity, its slightness, that made the face a regal beauty. Thus, Pascal
enrolls himself among the truly rare connoisseurs of excess in the nose, or at
least more splendor than you get down the slope of some nose-changed blonde
extra. An essay by Paul Strapper in 1879 pointed out that we really don’t know
the dimensions of Cleopatra’s nose anyway. But Strapper, undetered by the fact
that we really have no guide to Cleopatra’s body, imagines it anyway, seeing
her as an imperfect beauty, and thus a modern one, since we appreciate the
disruption of the line, the flaw, as integral to our vision of beauty – one that supposes a mercurial mind in a feu
follet body. This doesn’t seem to be Pascal’s idea, but at the same time, he
surely thought about the fact that the nose he was using as a monument for the
mortification of human vanity was large, or at least regal, and not short, or
demure.

The seventeenth century
seemed to have been especially interested in noses and legendary nose figures.
Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth century libertine.The legend of his nose
became a fixture of 19th century literature after Cyrano’s work was
rediscovered by Nodier – and it might not have been an obsession of his
contemporaries. Theophile Gautier, in an essay on Cyrano in his Grotesques,
wrote that the Voyage to the Moon and the nose were Cyrano’s great works, one of
art and the other of nature . Gautier described it as a mountain comparable to
the Himalayas, or as a tapir’s trunk. This
is sheer nose trumpeting, or thumbing one’s nose at fact in favor of funny.

The eighteenth century,
as far as noses went, was long on farce. One of the great nose writers is
Laurence Sterne, of course, who ransacked the connection between the nose and
the penis until he owned it. However, myself, I’m interested in another nose
man whose marriage could have formed the basis for another kind of Tristam
Shandy. Lord Elgin, who stole much Greek statuary for the British in the early
nineteenth century, lost his wife to his nose – or rather, his lack of one. It
seems that Elgin contracted some horrible disease in the Middle East that ate
his nose. His wife, according to testimony at their divorce trial, then lost
all interest in her husband, and took up
with a neighbor who, presumably, had a nose: a Mr. Robert Ferguson.

Byron, of course, made up a gossipy couplet
about Elgin:

Noseless himself, he
brings home noseless blocks

To show what time has
done and what… the pox.

And so we reach what I
consider the height of the nose in literature if not life: the nineteenth
century, and Gogol’s The Nose. Here, finally, the outer coat of the nose
develops an interior interest, a soul – a sinus of a soul. Nabokov, who is
often so concerned to be clever, as a critic, that he fails to be interesting,
wrote one good critical book – a study of Gogol. Nabokov, among other
interesting things, contends that the nose figures majorly in Russian talk –
there are hundreds of proverbial sayings that employ the nose. “The point to be
noted is that from the very start the nose as such was a funny thing to his
mind (as to all Russians).”

The humorousness of the
nose leads us away from the mortification it marks, perhaps – or perhaps that
mortification finds its true beauty here. But myself, blowing my nose in a wild
trumpet solo lasting ten days, have a hard time seeing the comedy here – or rather,
I am desensitized to what I know is a ticklish subject. The cold forces us
inside the nose, and there – as is similar, in popular sentimentality, with the
clown – all is tears. Furthermore, of course, this is my nose, the nose of a
man who, having achieved 56 years of nosewearing activity, must acknowledge its
rougeur and scaliness, at times – the results of too much sun and too much
booze, or at least beer. So even when I am not forced into a stricter intimacy
with my nose than I want, I view it with a bit of dismay. There it is, staring
back at me in the mirror, and making it very difficult for me to shave over my
upper lip,

Yet I have to give the
nose some credit. Surely the inner sound of writing – the thing that I go by to
get me from a to z – goes much much better when the nose, whatever its outer
look, is comfortable inside. That inner noise is something I become partially
deaf to when I have a cold, which is why I stop writing.

I write this as,
hopefully, the epitaph on the gravestone atop my former cold, and to celebrate
the faint re-awakening to my inner
tintinabulation. My nose is almost back!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.